Self-Awareness as an enabler of Cognitive Security

Security specialists face complex situations where they need to make immediate decisions based on the analysis of large volumes of information, exceeding it their human capacity. Cognitive systems are proposed as an alternative to reduce this limitation, motivating us to investigate its use in the field of cybersecurity, known as cognitive security. Based on the review of the literature, we found different concepts of cognitive security with diverse approaches. Thus, our first contribution is to present a definition of cognitive security emphasizing the use of cognition for making decisions in real time and including the term self-awareness. Additionally, we investigated how to generate cognition in digital environments, including self-awareness adapted to computer systems. We propose self-awareness as an enabler to implement cognitive security, for which a second contribution in this paper is to generate the state of self-awareness from the cybersecurity approach using the contributions of autonomous computing, and establishing the technical and non-technical solutions for its implementation.